'Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat' Almost Makes Corporate Culture Seem Fun

Anthony Norman is your typical Gen Z worker: 25, a little wayward, and struggling to find a full time job.

You can’t exactly fault him for the position he’s in. Unemployment rates are high. AI is creating a crisis for young people trying to enter the workforce. Hiring has slowed. And several companies—including Amazon, Block, and Meta—have embraced tech’s latest era of layoffmaxxing, with some cutting their staff by 20 percent.

So when Anthony lands a temp position at Rockin’ Grandma’s Hot Sauce, a small business in Southern California, he’s just happy for what he assumes is a regular gig: assisting with odd jobs and helping plan the annual retreat.

What Anthony doesn’t know is that he is actually the mark of Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat, the second season of Prime Video’s experimental docu-comedy where one person unwittingly participates in a staged sitcom (the first season, which blew up on TikTok and snagged three Emmy nominations, was about a fake jury trial). Everyone is an actor except for him.

Anthony joins the team during a moment of transition. The founder, Doug Womack, is preparing to step down. His son, Dougie Jr, is next in line, and because not everyone thinks he’s fit to run the family business, he wants to prove that he’s more than an unqualified nepo baby—“the Bronny of hot sauce,” he says. Having just returned from a four-year stint in Jamaica “jamming” with a hotel lobby ska band called the Jive Prophets, the retreat is meant to be a test for Dougie Jr.

The season trades in the monotony of cubicles and watercooler talk for Oak Canyon Ranch, a cozy resort and recreation center nestled in the grassy suburb of Agouria Hills—about an hour drive northwest of Los Angeles—where the staff convenes for various activities: team building, a client cookout, motivational speakers, and a talent contest. Desperate for “one week without Cocomelon” and her three kids, Jackie Angela Griffin, the distribution and logistics rep, is ready to get away.

Like all offices, Rockin’ Grandma’s is a circus of eccentricity and ego. Accountant and bourbon enthusiast Helen Schaffer has been “cooking the books for 26 years.” Receptionist PJ Green has dreams of being a snack influencer. Sourcing manager Anthony Gwinn, who at one point confuses a flesh light for a water thermos, is jokingly nicknamed “Other Anthony” despite working at the company longer. Kevin Gomez, head of HR, has flashes of Michael Scott: He’s an overeager, comically delusional, hopeless romantic who loves his job and Amy Patterson, the customer relations coordinator. “Hot Sauce is having a moment,” he tells Anthony during the onboarding process. “You don’t see this kind of thing happening with ketchup.”

On day two, eager to demonstrate his instincts as CEO, Dougie Jr. calls an audible and brings in an “emotions and vulnerability expert”—she’s the Walmart version of academic Brené Brown—who confusingly leads the group through a conversation on how to navigate uncomfortable scenarios.

It’s good practice for Kevin’s failed proposal to Amy—they’ve actually never been on a real date minus the one time he went out with her and eight of her other girlfriends on her birthday. A humiliated Kevin makes a quick exit from the retreat center, with cans tied to the back of his car, and Anthony is forced to step up.

“I got a promotion,” he says, improvising on the fly to lift morale by embracing the role of “Captain Fun.”

Even as people have struggled to find meaning in their work—or simply find work—TV’s fixation with the American workplace has always been popular with viewers. Mad Men examined the existential toils of advertising executives. Severance has contemplated autonomy, in addition to a lot of other very weird shit. And no series has explored the delightful chaos of workplace hijinks better than NBC’s The Office, which followed the oddball staff of Dunder Mifflin, a Pennsylvania paper company.